Blog

2015 October

Fred Campbell will address the First Amendment issues in the ongoing case against the FCC’s net neutrality rules during a BloombergBNA webinar tomorrow from 11 am to noon eastern. You can register for the webinar HERE.

Few industry analysts seemed surprised when Sprint’s new CEO announced “after thorough analysis” that the company won’t participate in next year’s auction of TV broadcast spectrum (known as the “incentive auction”). Analysts already knew that Sprint “has the spectrum it needs to deploy its network architecture of the future.” As a senior telecommunications analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence said in response to the news, “Sprint really has a lot more spectrum than its rivals, so they don’t have that pressing need to get more.”

The announcement is an embarrassment to the Department of Justice (DOJ), which apparently didn’t know (or didn’t care) that Sprint was flush with spectrum for the foreseeable future. When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was developing its auction rules, the DOJ urged it to “ensure” that both Sprint and T-Mobile would “win” spectrum in the auction. The DOJ believed Sprint and T-Mobile had to win “low-frequency” spectrum in the auction in order to compete against Verizon and AT&T in the mobile marketplace. The FCC agreed with the DOJ’s expert opinion and decided to “reserve” the auction’s best spectrum for bidders other than AT&T and Verizon.